Serpent Bearer
by dusk-dreamer-midnight-thief
Summary: Flashes of the life of Professor (and ex-Professor, and non-Professor) Aurora Sinistra. Basically snippets I could not formulate into a coherent story and so decided to post them as separate chapters each detailing a certain time in her life. Rated T for the time being due to mature content that will pop up over time.
1. Numbers

**NUMBERS**

Numbers were easy.

Numbers and logic were not things that came so easily to magical folk as they did her. But Aurora could master that with absurd ease. Her hands would streak across the parchment, scattering the aged bark with so many complex equations that they almost fell like a meteorite shower.

Explaining the rules of the cosmos - she took on that responsibility with pride. Her scientific mind yearned for it. Yearned to answer questions unanswered. Unknown.

Numbers were easy.

Numbers didn't confuse her, didn't cut her open and twist its vicelike grip upon her heart. Numbers didn't shellshock her soul. Numbers didn't keep her awake throughout the Scottish wintry nights… thinking… tormenting… torrential…

If she could have cut out her feelings with a scalpel she would have. Watched as her flesh containing the inexplicable fire for him was sliced open and thrown into the rubbish with the rest of the undesirable materials. She could get back to her equations and her mathematics. She could be free in them once again.

But desire… hatred… love… love-hatred… hatred-love… for _him_ … it clawed at her every being, ripping her body to shreds with its talons and leaving her for dead.

And yet she wasn't dead! What an absurd allusion to make, Aurora! Get a hold of yourself! Let them bleed out of you from your very veins and dribble down your quill and transform them into _something you can explain._ You're good at that, Aurora. You're good at transforming mystic into tangible.

Numbers were easy.

Why had he not come to her as an algebraic form? The stupid selfish git that he was. Why had he not walked into that room that one evening as a perfectly logical set of equations that just ached to be resolved.

Oh, she ached to resolve him. And yet she ached for his mystery. Her feelings were muddled and confusing and baffling and torturous and did she want it that way? Yes, yes, she did but no, god no, she didn't.

 _Give me my numbers…_

Numbers were easy.

This.

Whatever this was.

 _This._

This was a worst kind of death.


	2. Aliens

**ALIENS**

Aurora Sinistra had become a superb Occlumens over the years. This was more under duress than anything else... there were so many things, so many feelings, that needed to be hidden from the world - well, not so much the world as the Order of the Phoenix and He Who Must Not Be Named's band of brainless followers. There simply was no room to let any sentiment for him show. It was far too dangerous. They had both shrouded their minds from the rest of the cosmos for as long as she could remember.

And there was one particular memory, one particular time, she would keep close to her soul forever.

The first time she had ever looked at him and thought: "oh, god... _no_..."

She had finished two years of independent research for various Astronomy journal publications after her tertiary education at the Academy of Magical Astrophysics. Aurora recalled the exact time and place she entered a temporarily rented cupboard-sized flat in Alesund, Norway (where she had begrudgingly stationed herself and her many telescopes for several months) to find an incredibly underwhelming envelope sitting on her windowsill, illuminated by the third-quarter moon, stamped with that crest she had come to recognise so well. The crest of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

It had taken months, perhaps a year, to persuade Aurora to return to her old school - not shivering in her Slytherin uniform this time, but cloaked in the robes of a professor, an Astronomy professor, no less. The idea of being tied to a desk, to a classroom of jibbering, hormonal, self-centred teenaged dolts for an extended period of time did not fill her with great enthusiasm. But eventually, tired of navigating the world and with the intention of staying only for a few years at the maximum, Aurora had written back to Albus Dumbledore; accepting his request with a couple of requests of her own:

 _Headmaster,_

 _You've twisted my arm. I'll do it... as long as my own research is not interrupted._

 _If Sybill Trelawney comes anywhere near the Astronomy offices, consider my contract null and void._

 _My most kind regards,  
_

 _Professor Sinistra._

(Unlike the other Hogwarts professors, Aurora had already been granted the title upon completing her thesis and fellowship at the academy. This was something she arrogantly held over their heads...)

And so, one blistery Scottish afternoon after all day classes had been done and dusted, Sinistra had found herself feeling rather forlorn and lost in the staff room. A new and very young Astronomy teacher... but not newly lost... for she had always felt lost. Every time she stargazed into the abyss she felt the profound calling for the space between the stars. The universe was too vast, so phenomenally colossal that it was past all point of reasoning... and yet here she was, almost an alien on her own planet, tediously marking and ticking and crossing and writing comments in the margins of her students' work which would probably never be read.

Aurora had rubbed her temples viciously and before she knew it, almost in a subconscious trance, she found herself gazing out of one of the arch windows. It had been a chilly clear night, and the universe was out in all her monumental beauty.

The concept of marking papers fizzled away from all thought and she begun to yearn. For what, she did not know.

Perhaps for the stars. Or that space between the stars. Perhaps anywhere but here.

"You don't belong here, do you?"

It had taken a few moments for the voice to register and make her synapses click. Aurora had forgotten that she was not the only one residing here...

The stars all blurred in the sudden loss of focus, and she had snapped her head around to meet the caller. Her black dreadlocks momentarily curtaining her eyes before she managed to sweep them out of her face.

The Potions Master, Severus Snape, Head of Slytherin and someone she vaguely knew of in her own year at school, was casually meeting her eye of his own pile of ink-splotched essays.

"Excuse me?" Aurora snipped, far too accusatory than she had originally intended.

Severus shook his head and returned to his scribbling. The momentary eye-contact now broken - but it would be something she would never forget.

It had been one of the first times he had uttered any words to her since she had struggled through the doors of the castle, levitating her bags filled with monstrously heavy equipment in tow. It took her a few moments to realise the intention of his words.

You don't belong here.

Well... he wasn't wrong.

Aurora continued to watch Severus for a while. The deep line between his two black brows that had now permanently marked his face... so furrowed in concentration, dedicated to perpetual contemplation (and indeed contempt). She knew from school that he almost deserved the title of genius. Yet here he was, scoffing over potions essays written by the very same band of phlegmatic adolescents who had mislabelled all of the star charts she had set out for them.

She would admit this freely: she had never expected to see him in the staff room when Dumbledore had brought her around for a meet-and-greet with all of her new Hogwarts colleagues. She almost laughed in his face when Dumbledore had introduced the Astronomy Mistress to the Potions Master. School had seemed to be the worst place in the world to him when they had been students here together - what in his right mind would have possessed him to take an actual job here? To live here all year round apart from the six weeks in July and August?

If Aurora was too good for this, Severus certainly was.

And so she watched him most curiously. The original anger she had felt at his supposed snipe had completely vanished as she took on the true meaning of what he had meant.

She smiled to herself and her eyes momentarily flicked back upward to the sky.

"Neither do you."

She hadn't intended to say it out loud but these things so often happened to her.

The two professors held an uncomfortably long gaze, and she willed herself to break the contact but his eyes were so ominously deep, she found herself swimming in the vast black oceans that contained them.

And, after what seemed like eons, the corner of his lip turned ever so slightly. So slightly she would never have noticed it if she wasn't drinking him in so intently.

Aurora shook it off and looked back downward upon her students' mislabeled constellations; an undeniable prickling in her belly that almost made her want to swear out loud.

 _Oh god_ , Sinistra had thought.

 _...no..._


	3. Witchkillers

**WITCHKILLERS**

Aurora used to have to turn her face away from the witches and wizards of Britain who ever dared to complain about the International Statue of Secrecy - the separation of magic and Muggle worlds...

They knew nothing of secrecy. Of the true price of breaking their most sacred law.

British witches and wizards had the utmost privilege - a supreme advantage over Aurora's native kind: British Muggles did not believe that magic existed in the first place. The magical entities of West Africa were not so extraordinarily lucky.

Eshe Sinistra... Eshe Imari as she was previously known before her marriage... was a Muggle woman of the Tuareg clan on the outskirts of the Sahara. Her clan was made purely of Muggle women and men, yet she had somehow been fortunate enough to escape the magical suspicion that followed many women of her kind. Her family were progressive, intelligent, open and accepting, making the irony of demise all the more potent.

Aurora remembered her mother, as one would remember their own reflection a few moments after walking away from the mirror. She remembered that she was beautiful... her skin always covered in red and black markings signifying her Tuareg belonging, shrouded in black, her hair twisted in countless black dreadlocks very much like her own daughters... but there had always been a sadness in her eyes. A sadness and constant worry that Aurora could never shake the memory of.

Eshe had known nothing of magic, and nothing of the danger it brought in such territory, until she had met a travelling wizard named Dia Sinistra. She had first seen very far from her home in a marketplace in central Bamako; and oh, she knew he was different from when first she set eyes on him. Dark skinned as the night sky, cloaked in garments that appeared to have been acquired from every corner of the globe, and he spoke so eloquently (in four or five languages no less), as if nothing phased him - for he knew it all.

They had passed each other a few times, and then they began to talk in her native Tamasheq, they had fallen in love slowly but surely.

Her clan had been tentatively, half-heartedly, accepting of him when they had first announced their engagement. It was all Eshe could have really hoped for. All they knew, and would ever know, was that he was a travelling man, born and raised in neighbouring Ghana, and that he had a flair for the odd and unusual. Unlike most inhabitants of Mali, the suspicion that there was magical blood flowing in his veins - magical blood that would undoubtably be imparted to their children - was non-existent.

He of course had painstakingly delivered this shocking news to his Muggle fiancee before their upcoming marriage. Eshe could scarcely believe it: but she knew too well that there would be others who would believe it instantly.

The West African wizarding community was extremely well versed in keeping itself cloaked from the Muggle world. While Dia and Eshe occasionally struggled in hiding their three children's true identities to the world, it was with minimal effort that they were able to keep her husband's, her two son's, and her daughter's abilities under wraps. Their lives were uneventful... peaceful... bearable...

When Dia passed away, leaving Eshe with all of their magical children to raise on her own, that peaceful life had vanished almost as suddenly as the light left Dia's eyes.

An evil fire had begun to spread through the villages of the sub-Sahara. Muggle suspicion of witchcraft had begun to fester and bubble to boiling point and Muggles were being slaughtered by the hundreds and thousands. 'The Poison Oracle' - it had even claimed a name. The majority of the killings were, of course, not inflicted on real witches or wizards for they had many means of magical protection, but on other Muggles, with Muggle women being targeted as the most suspicious. Muggle women who acted slightly different to the norm, Muggle women who did not conform to expected traditions of their towns or their tribes or clans, Muggle woman who refused to obey. The death toll was steadily rising. The paranoia amongst the Witchkillers had reached epidemic proportions.

Oh, the British wizarding world may have believed that witch trials and burnings had all but been extinct for centuries. They were, of course, very, _very_ wrong.

No-one (and certain people had tried many, many times) would convince Aurora Sinistra that she was not the sole cause of Eshe's death. It was the Witchkillers who spotted a thirteen year-old Aurora casually levitating three inches above the ground during the holidays from Uagadou. It was Aurora's stupid momentary lapse of logical thought that had raised the alarm of witchcraft within their home. It was Aurora who led them to charge into the house and drag out her mother - suspecting that, as the Matriarch of the family, she was the primary source of the magic.

Her Muggle mother, her mother who had loved and protected and kept her daughter's secrets for all of her life, had paid the ultimate price for Aurora's one, tiny, terrible mistake.

The Witchkillers had dragged Eshe Sinistra into the almost barren street, a screaming teenager behind them, knowing that if she were to perform any further shred of magic then she would kill them both... they had pushed her crying mother down onto knees in the dust and had placed a bucket in front of her; they had torn off her silver necklace, engraved with Adinkra runes, and dropped it into the boiling water contained within the bucket.

"If she does not burn," they cried to the onlookers, "she may go free."

And Aurora knew, as everyone did by then, that this test was nothing more than an avenue to unleash even more pain on those "witches" already sentenced to death. She watched on in utter horror, screaming for her mother like a scared child once again, as the group of man plunged Eshe's hand into the boiling water to fumble around for her necklace. Her screams would Aurora's dreams and nightmares for years to come... until she was finally able to at least try and tune them out via the power of Occlumency. She could not even bear to look at the sight of Eshe's mangled and raw hand as the buckets was kicked away; the necklace lain scattered upon the ground - forgotten.

They had poisoned her soon after. With what fatal concoction of Muggle-made elixirs Aurora did not know. But she was left to try and fend for her mothers, keep her alive throughout the night, to no avail. She had curled up in Eshe's arms in the early dark hours of night, by daybreak, her mother's chest had stopped rhythmically rising and falling beneath her weeping daughter's head.

Her father and mother now dead, her two much older brother's travelling and living in wizard Britain at the time, her tribe now outcasting her... Aurora was left alone for the first time in her life. The Witchkillers had, for some unknown reason and a reason she would never get to the bottom to for the rest of her life, spared Aurora from death. Perhaps they believed that with her mother now taken from this world then her daughter's magical powers would surely perish along with her. Little did they know that it was the daughter who was the hunted witch after all.

The last thing Aurora remembered before she run back to Uagadou school and through the Floo network to wizarding Britain was picking up the remains of her mother's necklace and placing them around her own neck with trembling, shaking hands.

She had found herself in a completely foreign country, where, once again she was still the outsider. As she was too afraid to ever return to her home, she had found herself as a student of Hogwarts in her fourth-year. She would look around at her classmates constantly and yearn to connect with them over something, _anything_ , but no one had seen the horrors that she had seen. No-one in the Slytherin dormitories had experienced an all-powerful war on wizardkind by Muggles. A war that never ended up killing many wizards. A war that was truly Muggle against Muggle. Against _her_ Muggle mother, and not the magical family she was surrounded by.

There would be days where she would over a Slytherin student or two ranting about the Statute set out by their Ministry, and they would sneer and say how much better it would be if they simply let their powers roam free... Aurora had to turn her face and shut her eyes to block only the sentiment of it out.

 _You know nothing of secrecy..._ her mind would ache, and it would itch to shake them into submission and to unleash the nightmares she had experienced every day since that moment.

But she didn't. She kept the horrors locked away deep within, where no one could find them and persecute her further. She trusted no-one with her memories... even her thoughts...

No-one, save one.

And it would still be a good decade or so before she even divulged a single word about her past to him.

In many ways, Aurora agreed with the separation of wizardkind and Muggles. There had been too much hurt caused by the non-magical community in her past for her to ever truly recover from it. Muggles were violent, suspicious, contemptible, willing to sacrifice their own kind if it meant that the magical community would be obliterated once and for all. In fact, her mother would be the only Muggle she would ever be able to love.

For the rest, she harboured nothing but hurt and ill-will. She was angry. She felt she deserved to be angry. She had no wish to change that fire within her.

 _You know nothing of secrecy._

 _You know nothing of true danger._

 _Nothing of hiding everything you were born to be under fear of death and torture._

Aurora had been there. Had suffered beyond repair there. Lost the most important woman in her life here. And it had taken endless Occlumency lessons and endless nights talking with the only man she had grown to love, to understand that it was ok to be angry, and that it wasn't her fault.

It was _their_ fault.

And though the suffering would always be there, gnawing away at chest until she was a much older woman than her mother ever turned out to be, the suffering had dulled year-by-year, decade-by-decade. Nowadays she did not feel as quite alone.

They still knew nothing of secrecy. But now, instead of bitterness at that thought, Aurora merely felt relief that they were oblivious to the real threat of Muggle exposure.

They didn't deserve the pain of knowing what Muggles were really capable of. They didn't deserve a lifetime of nightmares and suspicion as had been forced upon her. Hogwarts and Britain in general had now become Aurora's safehaven from true atrocities. And least she had that. At least she, and everyone else around her, had some kind of future.

Every night she would take off her mother's necklace and kiss each and every single rune upon it in gratitude.


	4. Hands

**HANDS**

"Miss Sinistra!" Professor McGonagall would shoot across the Transfiguration classroom at her in particularly every single Transfiguration class Aurora could remember, "your wand! Control your wand!"

The teenaged Aurora would sigh heavily and furrow her brows in concentration as she focused back on this long piece of Fir wood between her fingers… willing, asking, _pleading_ for her magic to properly manifest itself out of its tip.

But instead of the china plate on the desk in front of her elegantly transforming into the pretty and impeccable lilac teapot as it did for Miss Pristine-Perfect Lily Evans one desk down - it exploded into a fireball.

And day after day, month after month, the explosions still happened. She had barely managed to get it under control enough to pass her Transfiguration and Charms N.E.W.T.'s but her resentment toward her wand remained. Regular explosions continued to occur.

Aurora was good with her hands… no… she was _very_ good with her hands. She could perform the kinds of magic with her hands that all the British witches and wizards around her could only _just_ perform with the stick extensions. In Uagadou there was hardly any need for apparatuses to harness magic. The students learned to methodically control their magical capabilities through painfully rehearsed motions of the fingers and the hands; the uneducated may have seen it as more 'primitive' and slapdash in comparison to wang magic - but Aurora and all others trained in such powerful forms knew much, much better.

It felt far more natural, far more innate, to play with the cosmos in the palm of her hands than it did her stupid stick, which was forced upon her when she arrived at Hogwarts in her fourth-year.

Oh, she could use a wand well enough through her studies post-school and in her position as Astronomy professor. She _could_ use a wand. But that was not to say that she ever wanted to use a wand.

Sinistra harboured much resentment to the Professors who had attempted to stamp the wandless magic out of her when she was at school. What difference was there, really? The real difference was that her power was more unpredictable and therefore far more dangerous than wand magic… she was seen as somewhat as more of a threat that way.

And people didn't like that.

Even as an adult she was self-conscious about ever using her hands to spell cast - no matter how natural it felt. Even, Severus, Gitface, bless him, who had always done nothing but encourage Aurora to be the kind of magical practitioner she felt she was naturally born to be, done nothing but worship the immense power she could wield, used to wince occasionally when she threw up her hands in frustration, or pointed at him, or if she even motioned to stroke his face…

She recalled one poorly thought-out comment of his: when she had finished her night Astronomy classes and had accosted him in his bedroom. Sinistra had viciously pushed him down upon the pillows and was halfway snaking her fingers down his abdomen when Severus sarcastically muttered, "try not to make it disappear or anything…"

Aurora stormed out of the room.

"I can make it more than disappear! I'll make you _wish_ it had disappeared!"

She had refused to speak to him for several days after.

As the years went on, the Fir wood and phoenix feather wand she was forced to waste her galleons on at Ollivanders, became less and less of a presence in her pocket. Aurora began to care just a little bit less about how others viewed her unstable powers. She almost found herself right back at the beginning, where she learned to harness the magic awaiting at the tips of her fingers. She learned to control it as one would learn to control a wand; she could finally form the most intricate and delicately beautiful of spells by means of hand dancing alone.

It was something that, instead of making her feel embarrassed and self-conscious as it had so oft done in the past, now made her feel special. Feel powerful.

And oh, she liked that.

The looks of terror on everyone's face whenever she threw up her hands just to fuck with them was a fantastic bonus, too.


	5. Potions

_'Danger lies before you, while safety lies behind,  
Two of us will help you, whichever you would find,  
One among us seven will let you move ahead,  
Another will transport the drinker back instead,  
Two among our number hold only nettle wine,  
Three of us are killers, waiting hidden in line.  
Choose, unless you wish to stay here for evermore,  
To help you in your choice, we give you these clues four:  
First, however slyly the poison tries to hide  
You will always find some on nettle wine's left side;  
Second, different are those who stand at either end,  
But if you would move onwards, neither is your friend;  
Third, as you see clearly, all are different size,  
Neither dwarf nor giant holds death in their insides;  
Fourth, the second left and the second on the right  
Are twins once you taste them, though different at first sight.'_

When she had caught sight of the teetering, towering pile of scrunched up parchment containing the first five or so first-drafts of the logic puzzle she had snorted in his face. Severus did not take it kindly.

"You can piss off out of my office if all you're going to do is sit there and snigger like some pubescent teenager, Borealis!" he snapped viciously as Aurora doubled over on the opposing chair, her shoulders shaking with each splatter of laughter.

She held her stomach tight, as she barely managed to get out any response.

"Oh, I can't-" the Astronomy professor breathed in quick succession.

" _Get. Out_."

"You mean to say you - you've been sitting here all weekend? Writing _poetry_? This is most adorable."

"I have been working on creating seven potions of varying properties, undetectable and complex far beyond your meagre understanding of the science, in order to protect one of the most dangerous artefacts ever held at the school!" the Potions professor bit back over the angular feather of his black quill - a little hurt, perhaps… _very_ angry…

"What have you been up to, I wonder?" Severus continued. "Staring into black space every evening, being completely and utterly useless as per?"

Aurora gave a mocking lock of being struck with his defensive insults.

"Ouch…" she smirked, her brown eyes flicking up at him from her crossed arms.

It was commendable, Aurora supposed, what he was doing for the old man. Not that the old man had ever extended her an invitation to protect the Stone… the old man would rather die than include anyone outside of his 'dream team' in his schemes.

It was commendable. But she was not going to let the idiot Gitface know it.

Besides…

"I could still do a better job," Sinistra grinned at his face - slowly contorting with rage with every passing second.

Snape's jaw clenched down hard on his teeth.

"You could?" he muttered. "Couldn't do a better job at ceasing your incessant claptrap by any chance?"

Aurora's fingers swept across the desk and curled themselves around the cleanest sheet of parchment - free of ink splotches, hastily crossed-out words and torn edges.

"'Danger lies before you, while safety lies behind…'" she began to read out to the pair of them. Severus's breath was now so rapid within his pounding chest, his jaw almost contorted with fury, that she was surprised he hadn't come leaping over the desk at her.

"'Two of us will help you…' I mean what is this gibberish?" she scoffed, sliding the paper back across at the twitching wizard sat before her. She leant back in his chair and slammed her leather boots down upon the desk. "Why even put a cute little puzzle for them to solve at all?"

"What do you suggest we do?"

Aurora shook her head in disbelief. The trust this man placed in Dumbledore's insane ideas was downright ridiculous - borderline disturbing.

"… I suggest making it unsolvable? On purpose?" she answered, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. It _was_ the most obvious thing in the world. "If anyone wanted the Stone so damn much would it not make more sense to lock them down there forever?"

"Get your squalid boots off my desk."

"If he'd picked me…" Sinistra continued brashly, without even bothering to pretend she had heard him. "… you could bet your arse no-one in entire wizarding Britain would be able to solve it."

Severus released all of the frustration he could manage in one breath.

"Would this be the eternal question of how on earth you've managed to make it to thirty without someone strangling you to death?"

 _Oh, someone's on fire tonight._

Aurora smiled in the firelight. It was the first time Severus had to avoid her gaze.

"All that's needed is a room full of quantum equations to solve and those poor fools would be stuck in there forever. But, clearly-" she raised her hands in mock surrender, leaning even further back in his chair, "- Dumbledore doesn't have much faith in us _lesser_ mortals."

"Then Dumbledore doesn't know what he's talking about."

It was the first time she'd ever heard him utter a word against his apparent wizard-mentor. Aurora was almost sure he'd not uttered it intentionally, either, for his cheeks flushed the colour of the fire-licked walls that surrounded them. There wasn't much time to process the subtext behind his unexpected words, for he was already speaking over himself again, making up for the shred of softness he had shown…

"I'll take that bet, by the way," he said, a slow smirk desperately trying to supplant the hues residing in the pores of his cheeks. "You go away and create me your own little physics puzzle. I'll give you mine. We will see who completes what the fastest."

Sinistra frowned suspiciously at this request.

"Only if _I_ get the riddle wrong," she said slowly through squinted eyes, "I'll get poisoned."

The idiot's smirk widened further.

"Ah…" he drawled, Aurora felt an odd, ambivalent mixture of refreshment and disconcertment at the sight of him smile. "… so you're _not_ as confident in your puzzle-cracking abilities as I was led to believe."

In a flash of an instant, a slender but powerful dark hand emanated in front of him, almost out of thin air.

"You're on," Sinistra declared. As Severus reached out and took her hand within his own, she pulled him close toward her lips.

It was only at the very last minute that she decided to insult him rather than kiss him.

"I'll take the threat of being poisoned as collateral for how absurdly easy it'll be to beat you."

False confidence was so easy to pull-off when the other person in front of her had no idea of her past history with poison. The very thought of ingesting it had begun an inner battle with her desire to prove him wrong and the supreme trust she had in her abilities - that she would never get the bloody thing wrong in the first place and so there was absolutely no reason to worry about poisoning.

Also, the trust she had in him.

Yes, there were many things going on inside her head at present.

And being so close to the smug bastard was not…

Oh… perhaps that was not a good idea… Aurora should not have gotten so close. Not so close as to smell the fumes in his greasy hair… alive with bubbling elixirs, threats of explosions, such delicate and dangerous materials intertwined…

She could smell everything she ever feared, everything that woke her from her nightmares in a cold sweat, visions of darkened and obliterated veins, acid coursing through blood vessels. He was all of that. He smelled of all of that. And yet… yet she was not afraid. When it rose off his hair and his neck and his clothes it created an almost counter-acting effect… she wanted nothing else but to dissolve into him.

It was only his shoulders shuddering in clear bemusement that snapped Aurora out of her troublesome trance.

"I shall take the threat of you being poisoned as collateral _any_ day, Borealis."

The sallow and onyx fingers disintegrated as pink and brown lips both curled triumphantly. She had left his office with a skip in her step, and one of his earlier drafts stuffed into her pocket as a secret keepsake.

Of course she had ended up winning the bet by miles. And he had refused to ever speak of it again.


End file.
